Moo

by Smiley, Jane

  “I noticed.” He sounded glummer than he had intended, since he didn’t care about his promotion anyway, and he hadn’t actually been singled out—

  Cecelia sighed. “Believe me,” she said, “this started as a trim.”

  “It’ll grow back. I mean, won’t it?”

  “She just didn’t know how to cut it, and she kept trying to even it off, and then she got panicky, and I got panicky, so we looked in some magazines and this is what happened. When she was finished, she cried, so I couldn’t.”

  “Won’t it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I THINK it will grow back.” He made himself sound more confident. “Of course it will grow back.”

  “But this is a sign. The first thing she said was that she had never seen hair like mine before. I think this is a sign that I should go back to L.A.”

  “Oh, Cecelia—”

  “No. I mean it. It’s not working out for me here. And I just got a notice that my class size is going up again in the fall, to forty students. How do you teach a foreign language to forty students at a time? That’s an educational forced march! And then, a year after that I come up for review. How do I teach a hundred and twenty students per semester with any sort of care and still rework my dissertation so that I can get all the articles and the book accepted that I need to have to show I deserve tenure?” She ran her hand over her bristly head and jumped up. “But why should I want tenure? I can’t even get my hair cut! I can’t even get warm or make friends or feel like this will ever in a million years be my home! Why make the effort? Why bother?”

  The first thought that leapt into Tim’s head was, Because I wish you would. On the other hand, self-improvement-wise, he was trying to get away from the first-person point of view, move toward something more detached and omniscient-like. So he said, benign, judicious rather than pushy, selfish, “What are the possibilities out in L.A.?”

  She sat down again, leaned back, lifted her heels onto his desk. “You know, Tim, that’s the question of the century. I’m serious. When I was in L.A. for Christmas, I was looking at that album my mom gave us all, with pictures of my grandparents and my aunts and my mother, and the first car and the little trees, and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t figure out how in the world we ever got to L.A., how it came to be that my parents CHOSE our life there. Well, of course they didn’t! They ended up there. I come from a family who could have LIVED somewhere, but instead just ended up. HE used to say—”

  Tim made a disapproving noise, and his eye strayed to the memo again. He turned it over so he wouldn’t be tempted to read it.

  “I know I promised to stop talking about him all the time, and I have improved, haven’t I? But this is important!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “United Fruit DID drive the farmers out of business! Cash crops DID kill the town they grew up in! There WAS nothing for them to do after four generations except move on! And moving on is what L.A. IS for, but that doesn’t mean you want to be there!”

  Tim shrugged, demonstrating knowing skepticism at this analysis. But he couldn’t sustain his habitual manner through the sadness of her next remark: “Now it’s my turn to end up.”

  He sighed.

  She crossed her ankles. She ran her hand over the top of her head. She winced. “To tell you the truth—”

  They exchanged a look and Tim could see that they were thinking the same thought. Here. Ending up here was not to be desired, preferred, wished for. Then, just then, with that look, her mood passed to him, and he saw his own future: stuck at associate professor, living in a rental, his students getting younger, his writing getting repetitive, his trips to New York getting more desperate, his circle of former lovers widening until it covered the whole campus like a pond, shallow and rank.

  “It’s that hog,” he said. “The picture of that dead hog on the front page of the paper. Maybe”—but he heard his own voice, and his own voice sounded suddenly thin and hopeless—“maybe something will turn up.”

  MRS. LORAINE WALKER WAS NOT accustomed to the position she now found herself in, regarding Just Plain Brown from the business side of his large mahogany desk. A person who preferred to sit, she was standing. A person who preferred to ask questions, she had just answered some. Now he beamed upon her, unchangeably good-natured.

  He said, “My dear Mrs. Walker. An organization is a delicate thing. I like to think of it as a field of balanced dynamics, energy shooting in all directions, but yet energy constrained and utilized. This, this is a field sensitive to the slightest distortion, where the least little wrong thing—a backwash of energy from an unauthorized source, for example—sets up a profound trembling in the whole.” His hand rested, relaxed and comfortable, on a printout of the library budget. Underneath that, Mrs. Walker knew, lay a printout of the athletic budget.

  “You might say”—he continued joyfully, clearly elaborating on the theme closest to his heart—“that an organization is a sleek, predatory animal, a panther, its eyes shining, its muscles rippling beneath the thick, glossy fur, all its attention focused on the LEAP, the SINKING of the TEETH into the NECK of the PREY—! But our panther has an illness. Certain cells have grown out of their assigned place. You would call that a cancer, would you not, Mrs. Walker? For isn’t cancer really an insubordination, and isn’t insubordination really a cancer? Are you with me, Mrs. Walker?” He leaned across the desk, openly trying to lock her gaze onto his.

  She was too smart for that, at least. She stared mildly, with respectful semiboredom at a spot on the wall just past his ear. She said, “I am with you, Associate Vice-President Brown.”

  The smile never left the rounded surfaces of his face. “Ah, Mrs. Walker. Mrs. Walker, Mrs. Walker, Mrs. Walker. Here is the point. We’ve attracted the attention of the governor, the legislature, and the board of governors. The president can’t do without Ivar, at least right now. So Ivar is going to have to do without you.”

  Mrs. Walker shifted her gaze to Just Plain Brown’s face. He said, “I want to assure you, Mrs. Walker, that I am fully aware of your civil service status.” His voice grew even kinder and warmer. “And I know the procedures. You, Mrs. Walker, are in big trouble.”

  THAT WAS IT, then. The very night of the day that that big hog fell at Keri’s feet, they had their discussion and it was all settled. Their minds were made up, and it was fine, really. Diane was pledging a sorority, just the one she’d had her eye on all along, the little-sister sorority to the fraternity her boyfriend belonged to, and maybe if she joined, the two of them would stop bickering all the time. Besides, it was also the blondest and the most prestigious. Keri had gotten the newspaper out that very afternoon, after the pig, and found an apartment—a studio over the drugstore across from campus. She was over there now, looking at it. It looked like Sherri would be moving in with some girls she’d known in high school who lived in a regular dorm, and so what if it wasn’t her first choice (smaller room, same number of girls, of whom that Doreen, whose boyfriend Sherri had slept with in the fall, was one), financially, it was her only choice. Mary was going back to Chicago. Things hadn’t worked out with Divonne, who would lose her work-study job when the cutbacks went into effect, and the only job she had been able to line up was at the McDonald’s in the commons, at half the current pay, ten times the current tedium. The idea of the apartment where they were all going to celebrate Kwanzaa and explore their African heritage had popped like a bubble.

  Mary preferred going back to Chicago, actually. It wasn’t worth the hassle here, and she was tired of going around and around about it with Sherri, who wanted her to stay in Dubuque House and just find two more roommates. Sherri was nothing if not persistent. A hundred times a day, she said, “I just don’t understand, what IS the problem? Your teachers love you, you’ve got a great boyfriend, AND we can store our stuff here all summer instead of sending it all back home!” The last thing Sherri wanted to do was expose her duffels to maternal scrutiny. “I mean, she thinks wearing
BLACK is one of the main signs that you’ve had sex!”

  At this, the other three girls would exclaim in unison, “Isn’t it?”

  Carol, who had not quite yet been told of Mary’s imminent arrival in Chicago and who did think that Mary would be staying in Dubuque House over the summer, going to summer school and working on the cleaning and maintenance crew, would certainly have at least as much trouble understanding the problem, even though Mary herself knew just what it was. It was that she could not imagine herself here. She could watch herself walk across the campus, enter classrooms, study in the library, eat in the commons or in the Dubuque House dining room, dance with Hassan at a party, but still not grasp where she was going or why she was doing anything. When she thought of the campus or her classes or even her room, she was absent. There wasn’t even a space where a black person should be. Embarrassed as she would have been to admit it, this seemed to be the ultimate effect of THAT TIME in the commons, and probably of the way it had been glossed over or forgotten since. No amount of friendliness on the part of her roommates (white) or approval on the part of her professors (white) or partisanship on the part of her friends (black) or affection on the part of Hassan (neither) got at the root of her problem—the longer she stayed here, and here was the whitest place she had ever been, as white as any world she would have to succeed in in order to satisfy Carol, the less she seemed to exist.

  You could delve into the causes of this feeling all you liked, and if she divulged it, there would undoubtedly be more delving by everyone than she could bear, but delving into causes wouldn’t erase the feeling, it would only make her feel guiltier that she had given in to it.

  Her plan was to take a strong line with Carol, stronger than she had ever taken—she just wasn’t as ambitious as Carol wanted her to be, success on her terms was too destructive, and furthermore she didn’t have to do what she didn’t want to do, and Carol couldn’t make her. Adamant refusal was her trump card. It was just thinking about the fight ahead of time that was the problem.

  In general, however, everything was fine. More than fine. Everything was good, and if people would just leave her alone, things would be even better.

  KERI SAT on the edge of the bed and looked around the tiny room. If you leaned far enough in each direction, you could reach all the amenities from the bed—the closet, the hot plate, the sink, the window, the shower stall. It was the smallest room Keri had ever seen, and she almost regretted having rented it already, having impulsively paid over her deposit before the landlord even opened the door to let her in. “Really,” she had said, “as long as it’s clean, anything is fine with me.” But now that she was here, by herself (there wasn’t really enough space for the landlord to be in here with her), she was willing to narrow her definition of that term “fine” a bit. It wasn’t exactly that she couldn’t imagine herself living here, it was that imagining herself living here was all too easy—ensconced in the bed; no space between herself and her things for anyone else to occupy; obsessed, as she knew she would become, with keeping everything in its tiny little place. And it wasn’t even so much that she feared the prospective isolation. Her fear was more or less abstract. It was rather that she welcomed it, welcomed what a relief it was going to be. She could sit on this bare bed and look around this tiny, empty room and recognize it perfectly as the mold of the person she was going to become.

  WHEN BOB CALLED his parents in search of some solace and told them about Earl, his mom said, “Oh, honey! I’m so sorry, I know there’s nothing I can do to help, but I’ll send some cookies, how would that be? I just made gingersnaps today, I can get them in the mail tomorrow morning! And I was going to write you a note anyway, because Aunt Edna had a heart attack over the weekend, and if you think you’ve got problems, you should see her! A quadruple bypass is the least of it! You really ought to send her a card in the hospital. While your father gets on, I’ll find the address. Just a minute, honey.” Then his dad got on, and said, “Now, son, remember when those puppies died, the German shorthairs we had such hope for, the whole litter of four, and we’d spent a hundred bucks on the stud fee? The problem was that we were already counting the money we were going to sell those pups for. And then the bitch, all on her own, went out and got pregnant again right away, and when those pups were born, even though they weren’t purebred and we couldn’t sell them, those were the best dogs we ever had, and everyone we gave a pup to said the same thing—smart as a whip and not bad-looking, either. You know, I always say, when something bad happens, that it might all turn out for the best. Here’s your mother, she’s got something to tell you, just a minute,” and then his mother said, “Well, I must have thrown out that slip. Bart, did you see that slip I had? It was the corner of that envelope, that subscription envelope from that magazine, you know which one I mean, it had some red writing on it, we talked about signing up the other night. Now where did I put that—”

  Bob, who had been tapping the open closet door with his booted toe, suddenly kicked it shut as hard as he could.

  “Oh, here it is, no, that isn’t it, that’s that other letter I was looking for. I’d better put that away right now because otherwise—Oh, yes. Edna Carlson, Hope Hospital, Hope Junction, now I can’t read the zip code, but you know they have those books at the post office, and you can just look in there—”

  Bob could hear her side of the conversation spiralling inward. Her voice was getting softer and he could just see her gaze dropping downward and inward.

  He said, “Forget it!”

  “Pardon me, dear?”

  “I said, ‘Forget it!’ Forget Aunt Edna! I can’t stand her anyway! Who the fuck cares about Aunt Edna? You don’t!”

  The silence on the other end of the line told him he had caught her attention. He made the fatal error of marshalling evidence to prove his point. “Just last summer you said she was the most self-centered woman you’d ever seen, that time she made Grandma wait in the rain while she—”

  “Son?” intoned his father.

  And then he threw Gary’s portable phone right at the window, which broke with a glittering smash, and then the phone shot away into the night.

  66

  The Provost Reflects

  IVAR HAD TO admit that while the headlines were as bad as could be, the picture of Mrs. Loraine Walker, captioned “The secretary to the provost, who happened to be on the scene when the animal escaped, directs disposal of secret hog,” was reassuring. A bulldozer could be seen pulling up in the background. As always, an ambience of perfect control seemed to have settled around Mrs. Walker—she had had the kid who was apparently in charge of the animal escort the weeping girl back to her room; she had breathed no word of the ultimate end of the animal’s remains (what could you possibly do with such an enormous hog besides eat it, pace the local chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?); she had, in short, acted as if a hurtling hog, while surprising, was hardly a matter of concern, more a joke than anything else, and the panic of those who ran, jumped, fell, or dove to get out of its way was understandable but almost, well, silly. No one, after all, was hurt.

  Dr. Bo Jones, though, had come under more serious scrutiny. Ivar and Mrs. Walker were both surprised to learn from the paper that he was in central Asia, and had been for some weeks. They were also surprised to learn from the university accounting office that recent charges for food, drugs, and a work-study student (this Bob person), all unauthorized, came on top of five semesters of similar charges and, indeed, on top of a still earlier, and somewhat startling, sum that went to the refurbishing of the hog’s quarters in Old Meats. All told, the amount the university had paid out for Dr. Jones’ hog-fattening experiment came to $233,876.42. Nor had any grants come in to defray even a portion of these expenses. And the university accounting office had been remarkably free in communicating this information to the news media. Governor O. T. Early had been quoted as saying, “Who’s in charge up there? Do I have to go in myself and kick some butt?”


  What is a university? Ivar couldn’t help but pause and wonder. When he’d first come to this particular university, at eighteen, he had easily found what he was looking for. It was 1953, and angular men in glasses, crewcuts, and bow ties were everywhere, a benign army of uncles, who liked to point things out with the stems of their pipes. He and Nils had themselves worn crewcuts and bow ties and answered to “Mr. Harstad” whenever they were called upon in class. Across the campus, in their own compound, protected by parietal rules and housemothers, the girls in their circle skirts and sweater sets were clearly a species apart, and were clearly being groomed for a mating ritual that Ivar and Nils eventually elected not to participate in, choosing instead to join the uncles. The place was merely a college then, a group of colleagues. It made no claims to universality.

  Over the years he had learned that the uncles tended to squabble a lot, that, in fact, the more any two uncles seemed to look alike superficially, the more bitter and profound was their antagonism toward one another. Another thing he had learned was that while from the outside it did appear that the greatest change in university life had been the grand infusion of money from all federal, state, and private sources, this infusion had had no effect upon intramural hatreds—they burned no hotter, and no less hot, simply because there was lucre at stake.

  He and Nils had easily understood the single promise of “a college experience” that would last as long as they made the grade. This college experience would cost their parents a rather modest sum and the return on their investment would be equally modest—a small measure of extra respect, a bit of added insurance that Nils and Ivar would live their lives in the middle class. In the fifties, colleges had to sell themselves a little. It hadn’t been obvious to everyone that spending money on higher education was worth postponing a good job or an apprenticeship to a well-paying trade. One of the brochures the college had put out began, “A college education opens doors.” A graphic of a hallway, two or three doors opening onto inviting groups of smiling men. A limited promise extended to a limited group.